[WIP] Decals are printed and I'm impressed!

(Previous Annihilator post: here)

I run a late '90s colour Canon Bubblejet Inkjet printer... Well I also have a Samsung ML-2010 Laser Printer but that's black&white only (ML is short for Mono Laser), but that's not acceptable for printing a blue dragon with pink sakura flower petals that's to be stuck onto the Annihilator. That said, the quality of the inkjet outputs fairly low resolution. In a previous custom I had made, what was supposed to be the first car in the Illustrious Series didn't turn out the way as planned. Without getting into why that is, I had created a yellow stripe decal to run down the body of a BMW 2002. The stripe decal had 3 stripes, 2 thin, one thick, like this:

The problem is that the printer could make a line only so thin. The thinner stripes ended up being larger and the gap between each stripe was virtually gone as a result. With that in mind, I was worried the super fine details of the dragon decal would blend together into a blob. Before the print gets revealed, have a look at the graphic itself.

 That's quite intricate. It was traced (from the photos I took) on Illustrator. I didn't consider cutting down on the number of scales on the body since it was going to be shrunk to an awfully small size in the end. After seeing it printed, I'm actually glad I didn't.

Without wasting decal paper or colour ink, I tested the scale with an outline of the overall shapes. They fit. Now I test the colours on the colour printer. The blue on the dragon is a bit too dark and the background colour is way too bright. It's going to be printed on white decal paper since clear decal sheets get you an overlay and nothing 100% opaque so matching the car's body colour is required. Adjustments were made and I ran it through the decal paper this time.

The background colour turned out pretty close! Lucky guess perhaps? The lighter shade of blue pops out much better this time and the details, while they aren't super crisp, were retained pretty well for such a low-resolution printer. I'm hoping the graphics will be completed by the end of tomorrow. All that's left to do then is to work on the engine itself.

 I realize I haven't blogged about the paintjob itself. It was a small step and didn't feel like it was needed, but now that there's a clear indication the body has been painted, these are required now:

What's next after tampos? Find out here.